Woman Says She Was Assaulted, Robbed for Wearing Google Glass

A San Francisco woman claims she was assaulted and robbed for donning Google Glass at a bar, the latest incident of backlash against wearers of the high-tech specs.

Tech writer and social media consultant Sarah Slocum said she was at Molotov bar on Haight Street Friday night wearing her Google Glass when two women confronted her. A man then ripped the $1,500 wearable computing device right off her face.

?wmode=transparent"OMG so you'll never believe this but... I got verbally and physically asaulted [sic] and robbed last night in the city," Slocum wrote in a Facebook post Saturday. "Had things thrown at me because of some wanker Google Glass haters, then some *bleeeeeeeeeep* tore them off my face and ran out with them then and when I ran out after him his *bleeeeeeep* friends stole my purse, cellphone walet [sic] and everything.."

Before they were taken away, Slocum managed to use the headset to capture a video of the kerfuffle, which she posted on YouTube.

"After being verbally accosted and flicked off by the Asian looking girl, I turned on the video, and after I told them I was doing so they got pissed off and came after me," she wrote in the video's description.

Before the fight broke out, Slocum had been showing off the glasses to other patrons of the bar, who were eager to see how they worked, according to CBS San Francisco. But then as the night went on, a group of bargoers became upset about the possibility of being recorded by the glasses. The confrontation reportedly turned violent around the time the bar was about to close, when a friend of Slocum's threw a punch at one of the anti-Glassers.

A witness told the television station that the rowdy bar crowd was yelling at Slocum to take the glasses off.

"I think everybody was just upset that she would be recording outside of a bar this late with obvious embarrassing behavior going on," the witness said. "And just rather insulted that someone thinks it's okay to record them the entire time they're in public."

Luckily, Slocum was able to recover the pricey headset, though her purse and phone are still missing.

Slocum told KRON-TV that she wears Google Glass almost everywhere she goes, and it's usually well-received. Most people are excited and curious about the specs, and want to know more about them or try them on.

Slocum is just the latest Glass wearer to face trouble over the device. An Ohio man was recently interrogated by federal agents for rocking the headset at his local AMC theater at the Easton Mall in Columbus.

Angela has been a PCMag reporter since January 2012. Prior to joining the team, she worked as a reporter for SC Magazine, covering everything related to hackers and computer security. Angela has also written for The Northern Valley Suburbanite in New Jersey, The Dominion Post in West Virginia, and the Uniontown-Herald Standard in Pennsylvania. She is a graduate of West Virginia University's Perely Isaac Reed School of Journalism.
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